Archive for the ‘Pasta A Million Ways’ Category

I went to the farmers’ market the other day and went basil crazy. I bought so much basil, the smell of it lingered in my car for two days (which was preferable to the smell of wet dog that usually dominates).

I often overbuy at the market, seduced by abundance. Then I go home and realize that I have set myself up for a lot of cooking, and irritation kicks in. But with the basil, this simply did not happen. I think it’s the way basil smells. It’s aromatherapy for crabby cooks; the perfume makes you actually willing to prepare food. Read More

I’m blown away by the NYTimes story about the woman who has written down everything she’s made for dinner for the last fourteen years.I can’t help but imagine what my own dinner journal would look like, had I undertaken such a project. Read More

We ate it. Everybody, even the picky people in my family (i.e. everyone) loved it, which makes it a Miracle Food. After all the days of prepping (click for details of Day 1, Day 2 or Day 3), this was an excellent result. My friend Jeffery had told me that if the lasagna verde at L.A.’s Angelini Osteria is the Gelsey Kirkland of lasagna, his is the “’57 Buick, or at least the Ethel Merman.” Okay, so not lighter than air, but it satisfies. Read More

Okay, today is Day 3 of The Hell Of Lasagna, a mini-series inspired by my friend Jeffery who claims that making lasagna is easy. (I know, WTF, right?) If you missed Day 1 and want to catch up, click here. If you missed Day 2, click here. If you are bored with this whole exercise, just go watch Hulu or something.

As the next in what seems like an endless series of steps towards eating this damn dish, I was planning on roasting a chicken today. I should have roasted the chicken yesterday, probably, and made the white sauce today, instead of the other way around, but crabby cooks are not known for expertise in food organization. Read More

Okay, my friend Jeffery talked me into this, and now I’m on Day 2 of The Hell Of Lasagne. If you missed Day 1, when I made the tomato sauce, you can click here to get up to speed. I’ve moved on now, making a béchamel, exactly as instructed by Jeffery. Read More

So, after I bitched about what a pain it is to make lasagna, my friend Jeffery told me to stop whining and try his recipe, which he swears is delicious and
“easy, but not speedy.” Now, to me, if a recipe is not speedy, it ain’t easy, but then, I’m a crabby cook, and Jeffery is one of those admirable people who understand the expression, “the joy of cooking.” Read More

I’ve found that this is one of those dishes that make men want to marry you. I could be imagining things (moi?), but I don’t think so: if you serve this pasta at a dinner party, the men look at you differently after the first bite. This causes their wives to look at you differently, too, of course, in a way that’s less friendly. Since I only have dinner parties once or twice a century, this is actually not much of a problem for me, but you should be forewarned.

In my family, only me and my dog Oliver love this dish. The rest of the group are frightened by foreign cheeses. But if your family are more adventurous (and sick of mac and cheese), or if you’d like your male dinner guests to want to marry you (you homewrecker!), this is the dish for you. Read More

When I returned to LA today after a three-week absence, my dog Oliver was the happiest being on earth. His ecstasy was very gratifying, although after a six-hour flight I could have done without the body block.

As soon as I brushed the golden retriever hairs off my black traveling pants (unlike Hillary, I was not wearing a traveling pants suit, and can we talk about what the difference is between a pants suit and a suit? Is it just that if a chick is wearing it, it’s a pants suit? What’s up with that? But I digress.) I rushed to the kitchen to make my imagined recipe for Louie’s tomato sauce. Read More

My husband has a thing about buying gas. It’s sort of like asking for directions: he won’t do it until the situation is dire. As you can imagine, this sometimes gets him in trouble, as it did when I was in labor, minutes away from giving birth to our second child. Luckily for Tom I was in too much distress to hit him with a frying pan when he pulled into a gas station on the way to the hospital.

He got in trouble again the other day when our big fat rental car conked out on highway 95 just shy of our Connecticut destination. Tom coasted down an exit ramp, at the bottom of which the car just stopped, refusing to go one inch further, stubborn as my husband.